L (and things come apart)

Ian Orti

Description

A small flat sits unoccupied above Henry’s café. When a woman comes to rent the room, Henry’s world begins an unusual transformation. As they grow closer the city itself is affected, changed, and slowly dismantled. Unsure if he is a victim of his own senility, the chaos inches closer and Henry suspects it may have something to do with the woman upstairs and the stranger she is hiding from.

“A haunting novella.”—Bookgaga

“Read this magical tale for beauty, pure and simple.”—The Coast

Informations

• Publié par: Invisible Publishing
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781926743103
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Half title
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Acknowledgements
About Ian Orti
About Invisible Publishing
Copyright Information


L
(and things come apart)
Ian Orti

Invisible Publishing Halifax & Toronto


for L


1

“IS IT THAT HARD TO POUR WINE, HENRY?” He wipes the dining room table with his napkin. “It will probably leave a stain you know.” Henry rarely makes eye contact with his wife anymore when she speaks to him. Her guests wait in silence for him to finish cleaning.
“Where is your place, Henry?” a guest asks, breaking the silence.
“Near the square,” Henry answers.
“Henry inherited it when his father died years ago. It was quite nasty you know. The old man died right there, mid-afternoon one day.”
“Was anyone inside when it happened?” a guest asks.
She answers for him. “No. It was dead inside. As always.” Henry smiles to himself, stares into his glass as laughter spills over the table and then takes a drink.
“Music,” she hiccups, “and more wine.”
The distance between Henry and his wife had begun even before he discovered her fondness for the salty taste of one of her colleagues. The gentleman in question is likely one of the men sitting at his table, or each of the gentlemen at the table, Henry figures, at different or simultaneous times. He allows his mind to go there. He puts them at this very table. Makes them into lions and they devour her. But the image dissolves and carries no weight. These are not his friends; she is hardly his wife. They matter very little. Their opinion about where and how he spends his time mean as much to him as the habitual orgasms his wife may or may not provide to one or all of these men.
As guests chatter amongst themselves, Henry’s wife turns the record over, sets the needle on the vinyl with a scratch and the music starts again. He recognizes the piece, centres on its arithmetic arrangement, its geometry, its arpeggios. He smiles when the guests smile, laughs when they laugh. It’s a game. The face mirrors theirs and the mind can be elsewhere. He closes his eyes, occupies himself again with the sounds from the record. Understands what it means to be a single note existing in isolation. Behind the guests, rows of books line the shelves. They are cells to him. For a moment he thinks he can hear the calls from inside of them. Above him, a fan rotates.
“Henry, he’s talking to you.”
“I’m sorry, could you repeat?”
“You need to find the man who sells you coffee and have him shot.” His wife and her guests laugh. Henry laughs to himself and responds with a smile. He raises his drink, smiles to the guests, and empties his glass.
Life is a city where time has given up on itself so there are no beginnings and no end. His life is the same dry verse of a broken record spinning endlessly beneath a needle. The same lines read over and over. A bad habit. Wine is poured into the glass of the only other woman at the table. She arrived late, after Henry, and is the only other person there who hears the music the way he does, who understands it not as a sound, but as a place beyond language. They are two solitary notes of the same score and come from a place where one plus one is one. But only one of them knows this.


2

HENRY’S PLASE IN THE CITY, his café or bistro, tavern or trattoria—each person had a different name for it—the hole-in-the-wall that was the subject of his wife’s amusement was a two-storey building occasionally occupied by those passing to or from the square. It was a small hollow on the side of the street and seldom saw the sun. As a result it looked empty from the outside. He filled it with anything he thought, or was told, best befit the interior of the type of place he was trying to create. Thick vines arched over pots, stretching to the floor, buds he’d been told would bloom but were instead locked in a state of perpetual stagnation. There were remnants of his father’s past, relics, photographs, books of which he had heard but had never read, posters of popular paintings from popular museums, and a discarded page he’d found one day while walking: black lines on top of words on top of more lines bending around one another settling on the shape of a woman with long black hair. There was the photograph of his father, wrinkled, with embers burning at the end of a cigarette hanging from his lips. An antique wooden chair. Old magazines and newspapers. He kept these simply because someone had once mentioned that people like to read old news, but he watched all of the regular visitors and none appeared noticeably moved or nostalgic about these magazines and newspapers. Instead they would ask about his finances since it appeared he couldn’t afford current news. But Henry reassured his critics by telling them that he kept them because the only things that changed in most stories were the dates and characters. The stories were repetitive and the events of one year mirrored those of the last. And if, after all things were said and done, things remained mostly unchanged, then there was no reason to provide anything new, since old news was evidently as good, or as bad, as anything current. When people told him that his place, therefore, held no relation to any real place or time, he would smile and nod, and tell them that his was just a place outside of the news. It was an explanation that stifled his customers, and they responded by waving their hand, brushing off his explanation and going back to their business.
Things he excelled at were few, but if his experience with people had made him a master of anything, it was the nod. When a customer was adamant about how they wanted a drink prepared, Henry would bring his eyebrows close together and deliver a short firm nod. If someone came in to lament their low wage or to tirade against the rich, or the politicians, or just the ubiquitous “they” responsible for all things right and wrong, good and bad, Henry would close his lips firmly, slowly close his eyes and direct a sympathetic nod to the floor. He had no close friends but he would befriend whoever passed through the door. When the odd builder came in, he’d talk about construction and the rising cost of supplies in the country, and when an artist stopped in for something to eat or steal, Henry would tell them the real art was in the streets, not in their bourgeois museums, and when they pointed to the walls and asked him why he chose to dress his walls like a museum he would say it was to remind him of where the real art was found. He always knew who wanted to talk and who wanted to be left alone. And if he was alone for long he would invent characters to talk with. This was how he spent his days now, a solitary man beneath the high ceilings of a place he used to escape or embrace the lull of a life he saw drifting away with the passing wind of another season, accompanying himself with strangers—real or imagined—who passed through the open door of his life and signalled their arrival with a wave or nothing at all.


3

“I’M NOT HAVING THIS CONVERSATION AGAIN,” said Lachaise. Lachaise was small and ambidextrous with a firm posture, a soft disposition and a wavering faith, which Henry exploited every once in a while. Henry enjoyed doing this. He would do this sometimes when he was bored. He would taunt the regulars.
Lachaise pointed a finger at him. “I’m late.” He paid for his two glasses of wine and, rising on wobbly legs, raised the glasses by their stems. “And I take these with me.”
Henry nodded and Lachaise walked out, passing Laplante on his way in.
“Laplante,” said Lachaise.
“Lachaise,” grunted Laplante.
Laplante was a lanky sort with a dry mouth, a light eater who drank mostly water. He leaned towards the espresso machine, and with a wiry arm pointed to a large cup. Laplante had arrived one afternoon with the intention of piecing together a growing collection of scavenged pages into a logical order, and it was from the early days of his collection that Henry’s relationship with him began. According to Laplante the ragged papers he found on a near regular basis all originated from the same source. With the progression of the seasons came more and more pages. At first it seemed a coincidence to Laplante, but as the days progressed and the pages piled higher, the coincidence naturally grew into a pastime, and the pastime into an obsession; he often sat for hours attempting to order his scavenged pages. When they first met, Henry suspected Laplante was new to the area, a stranger who mistakenly believed it was somewhere in the hollow of Henry’s barren place that the story would find life on the pages before him. Mistaken, Henry believed, because four seasons had passed since Laplante first passed through the door and though the pages mounted, the ending continued to elude him.
Henry eyed another loose page in Laplante’s hand. “How’s it going?”
“Oh, it’s coming. It’s coming along just fine. I’ll let you read it when I’m done.”
“Very well,” said Henry, “but